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--[Disco Wednesdayyy 25/?] Mercury retrograde, the perfection of 九十九十九, and twisting both a house and the plot to their limits [tw: body horror]--
Last time, Disco had a talk with JJ Styron about how fucked up the future world is, and we ended with Disco deciding to search for Mercury C’s shop in Chofu.
Still at JJ’s, Disco asks the receptionist about the shop that delivered the sweets. The pamphlet she gives him claims that the shop has just celebrated its third anniversary, which would mean it was only opened in 2016. Huh? Confused Disco swings back to JJ Styron’s office and asks him about Mercury C, but JJ swears he doesn’t even know that name. But Mercury C took part in the Pine House, shouldn’t his name be publicly known? Disco uses JJ’s computer to pull up an article about the Pine House case, which lists the following people as missing [putting the entire list here solely because it’s a nice reference. And yes, they put Nils first ;w;]:
Detectives: Mikami Nils Disco Wednesdayyy Judy Dollhouse Choukuuji Keraku Choukuuji Kiyuu Hakkyoku Sachiari Sabayama Nigouhan Kakiuchi Mama Jump Hidzuki Mame Gen Neko Neko Nyan Nyan Nyan Runbaba 12
Angel Bunnies: Fukushima Manabu Hongou Takeshi (great detective Hongou Takeshi Takeshi) Kato Jun'ichi (great detective Sakurazuki Tansetsu) Kimura Daisuke Kawai Kazuhiro Hayashi Hiroyuki Kamimura Tetsurou Tanaka Masatsugu Satou Kazuhiro Yoshida Yukino Hanada Sawako Kawabe Keisuke Miyazaki Natsue Hiroki Takako Mizorogi Fumie Kajiwara Ayako Nomura Rie Nonaka Mami Obata Aki
The article did list exactly 31 people, but no Mercury C. Runbaba 12 was listed instead, probably since his return to the past must have been also seen as a mysterious disappearance. Strange... Dezuumi should have remember that Mercury C was there, so why didn’t he?
[If you read the list of detectives carefully, you may notice that aside from Dezuumi and Mercury C, another important character isn’t mentioned, and it’s highly weird that Dezuumi especially wouldn’t remember him. Hmm...]
If the shop really was only created in the future, and the past seemingly changed in such a way that Mercury C’s actions may have as well not happened, then this would mean...
Mercury C came from the other side of Ragnarok.
The entire Pine House case as it happened was just a ‘fictional past’ to him, much like the current events with JJ Styron were a ‘fictional future’ for Disco.
If Mercury C came back to the future, and his influence into the past was completely erased, what results would it have? Was Disco going to disappear or lose his powers? While events like Mitamura’s death and the detectives gathering in the Pine House were set, Mercury C’s intervention changed so much -- would these changes disappear?
What if Mercury C never returned to the future and waited for Ragnarok? Would the fictional past simply disappear? But if the future outcomes were anchored in the past causes, what on earth would happen if those causes didn’t exist?
Why did Mercury C come to the past anyway? To lead Disco somewhere? Could he be secretly working with the foe and trying to figure out where Disco hid the kids? But no, future ‘Disco’ came back to the Pine House with a ‘Mercury C’ by his side, surely it’ll be alright...
Disco goes to Makuri-ya, which turns out to be located in a slightly different place than Mercury C told him. The staff has no idea who Mercury C is.
Confused, Disco wanders aimlessly through the streets. What is the truth here? What is the thing he’s sure is real, in the end? The children he’s going to save. He has to find a hiding place... maybe one that even Mercury C doesn’t know about. Something unexpected...
--
Disco arrives at his old apartment building, hangs out a little in the garden remembering better times, and tries to call his future self or anyone else to help him figure things out, but nobody comes.
Then he glances at a tree that he once carved his name in, notices the last two letters of ‘Disco’ are C and O, and suddenly remembers.
九十九十九 = COCOC
“That’s right”, the God of Detectives said during his explanation. “The perfection of the name ‘Tsukumo Juku’ will be realized.”
And earlier, “The culprit closed the ‘S’ shape back into an ‘O’, and Mitamura ‘wrote’ it again to ask for rescue.” This was his initial theory, before he redrew the supposed shape of the Stairway To Heaven from an ‘S’ to one more resembling ‘C’. The open shape of ‘C’, the closed shape of an ‘O’. Open, closed.
Natsukawa Cottage and the Pine House.
Natsukawa Cottage was turned into the Pine House by Mitamura. Then, Disco and the others turned the Pine House back into Natsukawa Cottage, at least in their own consciousness. After Ragnarok, once all the people who have this consciousness leave the vicinity of the building, Natsukawa Cottage will once more become just the Pine House. Open, closed, open, closed. C, O, C, O... But there is a fifth letter, one more C.
The Pine House is going to be opened once more.
[Lore note: this is incredibly similar to the near-far wordplay in Jorge Joestar. Once again we have two alternating states, and the protagonist using the pattern of the name 九十九十九 to realize that there’s one more switch between those states to come.]
Now that he thinks about it -- is the Pine House the perfect place he can hide the kids in? He remembers reading an article about Pineapple-chan, an alleged ghost of a child heard in the Pine House. Mitamura even wrote a book with a character called Yukidzuka Pineapple... was what Mitamura and his editors heard really a ghost, or just one of the hidden children? And if they could hear it, would this mean the kids were hidden in that compressed space-time between room 8 and 9, right next to where Mitamura was working on his books?
Led by a feeling, Disco jumps to the Pine House of the year 2019.
--
The future Pine House looks completely abandoned, as if nobody came here in years, though the damage they did during Disco’s explanations has been fixed. Even the holes in the wall are covered with new wallpaper.
Alright, he’s here, what next? He should already know what to do. If there were no detectives around to give him clues, then that should mean he already had all the information he needed and just had to put it together. What was the piece of information he overlooked? What didn’t come into play yet?
The 12 words from the Pine House.
отмачивание (‘soaking’; Maijo translates it as ‘peeling off something wet’) отмачивание (see above) Onsdag (Wednesday) Outrider Ovario (ovary) Onobwi (sixty) Olak-alik (repetition, back and forth) Oktubre (October) Oviana (when) Orquesta (orchestra) Oдоо (now) 廿六日 (26th day)
Aside from these cryptic words, what else can come into play? Disco remembers the Pineapple Home and the mirror world in its ceiling, then the Hanged Man tarot card. Should he try to change his perspective like Odin? He tries to hang down from the chandelier, but it doesn’t seem to be working. But wait, this is the future. If space-time is folded, then this world is already upside down. Maybe the first thing he has to do is to reverse gravity. To somehow fully convince his consciousness that up is down and down is up. But how on earth do you trick yourself into sincerely believing something? That’d be like playing rock-paper-scissors with yourself.
First, he has to trick his eyes. Disco activates the projection of the magic circle, so now the floor and the ceiling look the same, then takes care to remove everything that serves as a point of reference: the chandelier, the tables, the zodiac ornaments, the handrails. The fact that the hallway had two layers of carpeting comes in handy when he has to put one of them on the hallway’s ceiling, and he wonders if this -- and not just hiding blood -- was their true purpose all along.
Now to find a way to get to the ceiling. Disco remembers how in school they once made Moebius strips by taking a paper strip, twisting it and attaching the ends together.
The simplest way to get from standing on the floor to standing on the ceiling without losing the ground under your feet would be to twist the space of the Pine House into a Moebius strip and walk along the curve.
Disco runs through the hallway following this path, but soon realizes that this won’t be as easy as he expected.
Right in front of him, cutting between rooms 8 and 9 and protruding into the hallway, there is the white wall of the World’s End.
--
That’s the third damn wall Disco saw today. First was the transparent one in the bedroom, then the white one at World’s End, and then this one. Maybe a time wall would always be transparent in the forward-time flow, and white in reverse-time flow?
He tries to approach the wall from a different direction. Still there. On the second floor too. Like a white sheet stretching all the way up to the ceiling... perhaps continuing forever. Maybe 'behind’ this white wall was the compressed space in which his companions and the children were hiding? He tries to call them, but realizes that if the wall signalizes two time flows colliding, then there’s no way his voice would carry over. He tries jumping ‘behind’ the wall, but can’t.
Thinking about what to do, Disco enters room 9 and stares at the wallpaper-covered hole. During Kiyuu’s reasoning, they found Mitamura’s body there. The God of Detectives later claimed that Daibakusho had brought it back from the morgue... but was it really the case? Even if it was Daibakusho’s doing, what meaning did it have? Was it meant to show him that there was something more hidden inside the wall? Mitamura was still smiling, as if he died keeping some secret safe...
Without damaging the wallpaper, Disco jumps into the hole in the wall. No World’s End there, just cramped darkness. Hm. Okay, now to think about how to enter the world ‘behind’ the white wall.
While thinking, Disco warps space so that he’s floating gently in the air, curled in the weirdly comfortable darkness. Soon he starts feeling confused about where’s up and where’s down, so he stretches his arm to touch the wall. Nothing. He must have warped space so that the darkness stretched wider, or maybe it was himself that shrunk into this comfortable, womb-like darkness.
He’s slowly losing track of time. Without any point of reference, his inside time is getting uncoupled from the outside time. If people can’t go into another space-time because it clashes with their own, then maybe someone whose sense of space and time is nonexistent can get anywhere?
Disco feels as if he just got enlightened.
This quiet darkness, this ‘Black Box’, is a device made for the explicit purpose of getting rid of your sense of space-time so you can enter another space-time. It’s like a decompression chamber.
Disco focuses and jumps ‘behind’ the white wall.
--
Disco isn’t sure what he’s looking at.
It looks like a collage of many different worlds. He’s standing in the middle of a savannah, but to his right is a tall mountain, and to his left a beach with a diagonally titled sea. Multiple orbs hover in the air, each one containing a lush jungle.
Two cheetahs run up to him and introduce themselves in Japanese as Lightweight and Middleweight. “Are you alone?” they ask. “Where’s your companion? You know, your brother?... Huh? You really are alone? ...oh well. Hey, look, Ichirou and Jirou are coming this way.”
Indeed, two people are descending the mountain. The cheetahs run somewhere while Disco goes out to meet the two people. Just like he expected, Ichirou and Jirou are identical-looking Japanese teenagers.
The thing is, they don’t resemble Mitamura Saburou in the slightest.
But they look a whole damn lot like Daibakusho Curry.
After Ichirou and Jirou greet him like an old friend (how do they know him?), Disco asks awkwardly, “Sorry, do you have belly buttons?”
“Huh?” “What’s that?”
He shows them his own, and the boys seem concerned that Disco must have been stabbed in the stomach or something. If they don’t have those, then... are these two really Daibakusho’s lost brothers? And how on earth did they know his name? Did someone from the Pine House tell them? Were they in the Pine House during the case somehow?
After some thinking, Disco realizes what exactly happened [and boy, if it isn’t one of the wildest things to come out of Maijo’s books.]
--
When Daibakusho Curry / Sakai Tsutomu was still in the womb, he absorbed the bodies of his two brothers. However, the brothers continued to live inside his body as parasitic twins for close to 38 years. So in a way, they also took part in the Pine House case, and heard the explanations about consciousness and space-time.
And just like Kozue, simply by hearing the explanations they were able to learn how to warp space and jump in space-time.
When Daibakusho / the God of Detectives stabbed himself again and later almost died, his two brothers had no choice but to run away from his body by warping to a place they perceived as safe...
...into young Mitamura’s body.
That’s why young Mitamura was suddenly struck with a stomachache so strong it was mistaken for appendicitis. During his surgery, the brothers fell in danger of being cut out and dying, so they ran away again, leaving an empty cyst behind. Where did they run to this time? Somewhere close to Mitamura again...
...into his mother’s uterus while she was pregnant with him 37 years ago.
The two brothers must have learned how to change their own shape, as they managed to successfully grow into healthy fetuses and later be born along with Saburou as triplets, and were given names Ichirou and Jirou.
The two were raised by the Mitamura family until they were 14, when they suddenly disappeared. Maybe the difference in looks between them and Saburou was starting to become too obvious with puberty, or maybe they chose to leave to find their own freedom. Either way, they arrived here, into the world hidden inside the Pine House... right next to Mitamura Saburou’s own study.
--
As Disco looks around the patchwork world, he realizes that all the animals move in pairs. Giraffes, whales, even pandas. Pandas?
“Are Kon Kon and Den Den here too?” he asks.
“Yeah!” “Right there!” They show him two panda cubs frolicking in a bamboo forest.
“So it was you who took them?”
“We didn’t force them to go with us or anything.” “They just wanted to play.” “It’s fine if they have to go back now."
The culprits in the (animal) twin kidnapping case really were those two...
Apparently, in this Twin World every animal knows not to eat the others, and is able to make a world of their own to provide everything they wish for. Ichirou and Jirou are the only humans.
“Aren’t you lonely here?” Disco asks.
“Huh? But everyone is here.” “Same species or not, everyone’s a friend.”
“And you’re not sad at all?”
“Not really.” “We’re always happy.”
“Wouldn’t you like to go back?”
“It’s fine if we go back, it’s fine if we stay.” “Everywhere’s fine.” “The world before... it was alright, but it had so many unnecessary things.” “Happiness and sadness.” “Bitterness and amusement.” “Victories and problems.”
A giant world in the shape they could change as they wished. A giant world...
“Hey, would it be alright if I brought a whole lot of people here, so they can hide like you?” Disco asks.
“We're not hiding!” “We just kinda found this place.” “And made it bigger!” “And brought a lot of animals from zoos!” “And since we know how fun it is to play together as twins, we brought twins to play here!”
Weren’t hiding? But they disappeared in 1982 (which on this side would be 2030)... “You know you’ve been here for years?”
“Yeah.” “We have.”
“And you really didn’t make this world, just found it?”
“Yeah.” “It’s been here before that.” “There was no one else here, so we thought maybe we could play for a while, just the two of us.”
So this world was created somewhere after the year 2030. By whom? Maybe Disco will learn to manipulate time to this degree one day, who knows.
To think these kids really managed to jump behind the white wall... then again, if they could pull off time travel as embryos, they had to have giant potential. Maybe spending time in the womb was like the ‘Black Box’ and allowed them to learn how to change their internal space-time.
Anyway, Disco finally found the place to hide kids. He shares this idea with Ichirou and Jirou.
“Ah, but Mr. Disco, people from the future can’t go inside this world.” “Same with animals.” “We tried to get two fawns from 2015, but they couldn’t get inside.” “Those giant bandicoot rats from 2007 couldn’t either.”
Right, time was running in the different direction than outside. The Twin World has a forward-time flow, just like pre-Ragnarok world outside. If so... then maybe if the Twin World existed pre-Ragnarok, it’d have reverse-time flow, just like the post-Ragnarok world outside. He could hide kids from the future in the past Pine House.
[This is illustrated by a diagram spanning two pages. Since it’d be unreadable on tumblr, here’s a link to a bigger size.]
“Who knows about this world?” He asks.
“Only we two.” “And Mr. Disco!” “Oh, right.”
“Huh? You didn’t say anything to Saburou or Tsutomu?”
“Nooo.” “What if they did something violent? They’re into weird stuff.” “Like gore or that whole SM thing, gross!” “Or stabbing their own eye out!” “Gross!”
[LOCAL TEENS DISAPPEAR FOR OVER 20 YEARS, NEVER CONTACT THEIR GRIEVING BROTHER BECAUSE THEY’RE KINKSHAMING HIM AHGFKASJHDGKJ]
“What about the animals? Do they leave and come back often?” If they speak Japanese, they could spill the beans to someone.
“No, no.” “Once they’re here, they don’t want to come back.” “We only take them from zoos, where they’re kept in tiny dirty cages.” “Here’s much nicer.”
“But their parents are very sad that their children disappeared.”
“Yeah, but kids have to eventually separate from their parents. “Human kids too.” “It’s a little lonely, but you get used to it.”
“Anyway, please don’t come out of this room anymore, alright? Some bad people could discover where it is.”
“But everyone can come here!” “It’s a free place!” “How are these people bad? What kinda bad things they do?”
“Things like bullying children... or ending the world.”
“That’s horrible.” “Yeah, that scary.” “We won’t come out anymore.”
“You sure? I’ll need you to stay here for at least 13 years.”
“It’s fine!” “For us, it’s like 13 days.”
The time worked differently in this world. If it was 2019 on this side of Ragnarok, then it was 1993 on the other, so the two should be 25. But they still looked 14, since they could make time flow as fast as they wanted.
Disco says goodbye to them for know and goes to Kon Kon and Den Den’s place next. He tries to persuade them to come back to Run Run, but the cubs say she should come to this peaceful world instead, and they give Disco a piece of bamboo to pass to Run Run. Disco briefly considers grabbing the two by force, but they’re a delicate endangered species and all, so he just mutters “fair enough” in English, and is surprised when the cubs still understand that. Apparently, the animals here can speak every language.
Disco flies up trying to assess how big the Twin World is, but it seems to go on forever. A giant world, constantly changing before his eyes... Thinking about the speaking animals, Disco remembers the biblical Tower of Babel. When people tried to reach God, he struck the tower in anger and confused the languages. But in this world, there was no language barrier, no war, no horrible child abuse, and everything was just fine.
After one last look, Disco warps back to the Black Box, fixes the Pine House so that no one will notice he was even there, and finally returns to 15th July 2006.
#sparkly reads disco#maijo and jdc stuff#long post#possibly the most ridiculous plot twist in maijo is here and I'm dying#(it's great)
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